Powering Systems From Ambient Energy Sources

Ambient intelligence and the Internet of Things will require flexible and energy efficient hardware platforms to implement the long-term deployed wireless devices that form the physical substrate for these emerging cyberphysical systems. Energy harvesting from environmental sources such as light and mechanical vibration can extend battery life for devices as long as efficient power management circuits are available. Self-timed circuits, power-on resets, integrated switched-capacitor DC/DC converters and adaptively-biased linear regulators are complementary circuit techniques that can reduce cost and power consumption for microwatt energy harvesting and energy scalable systems. Low power and low voltage analog and digital circuits for sampling, digitizing, and processing external signals are essential for powering systems from ambient energy sources. This talk presents an overview of these topics and describes how exploiting the relationship between system requirements, circuits, and environmental energy sources can enable the emergence of the Internet of Things

High bandwidth interchip communication for regular networks dc by Rajeevan Amirtharajah.

Thesis (M. Eng.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1994.Includes bibliographical references (leaves 48-49).M.Eng

Life Cycle Aware Computing: Reusing Silicon Technology

Despite the high costs associated with processor manufacturing, the typical chip is used for only a fraction of its expected lifetime. Reusing processors would create a food chain of electronic devices that amortizes the energy required to build chips over several computing generations

Digital Signal Processing Research Program

Contains table of contents for Section 2, an introduction, reports on twenty-two research projects and a list of publications.Sanders, a Lockheed-Martin Corporation Contract BZ4962U.S. Army Research Laboratory Contract DAAL01-96-2-0001U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-93-1-0686National Science Foundation Grant MIP 95-02885U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-96-1-0930National Defense Science and Engineering FellowshipU.S. Air Force - Office of Scientific Research Grant F49620-96-1-0072U.S. Navy - Office of Naval Research Grant N00014-95-1-0362National Science Foundation Graduate Research FellowshipAT&T Bell Laboratories Graduate Research FellowshipU.S. Army Research Laboratory Contract DAAL01-96-2-0002National Science Foundation Graduate FellowshipU.S. Army Research Laboratory/Advanced Sensors Federated Lab Program Contract DAAL01-96-2-000

Design of a low power very large scale integration systems powered by ambient mechanical vibration

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1999.Includes bibliographical references (p. 161-166).Low power design trends raise the possibility of using ambient energy to power future digital systems. This thesis explores the design of such systems for collecting and processing data from sensors. The low throughput requirements of this type of computation allows aggressive scaling of supply voltages and enables very low power solutions. We discuss implementations of a generator for transducing mechanical vibration to electrical energy using macroscopic and MEMS technology. A DC/DC converter chip has been designed and tested to demonstrate the feasibility of operating a digital system from power generated by vibrations in its environment. A moving coil electromagnetic transducer was used as a power generator. A single generator excitation produced 23 ms of valid DSP operation at a 500 kHz clock frequency, corresponding to 11,700 cycles. An ultra low power DSP chip has also been designed that implements a power scalable detection and classification algorithm for a biomedical sensor. This chip demonstrates appropriate architectural and circuit techniques for low to medium throughput sensor applications. It consumes 550 n W at 1.5 V with a 1 kHz clock frequency.by Rajeevan Amirtharajah.Ph.D

Credit-based dynamic reliability management using online wearout detection

As circuit geometries continue to shrink, and supply voltages remain relatively constant, circuit wearout becomes a concern. We propose that the relative reliability of the circuits of a processor be exposed to the operating system, and be managed by a credit-based wearout monitor. This wearout monitor receives dynamic updates of the reliability of circuits through the use of stability detector circuits that are small enough to be widely deployed. We find that through the combined use of the wearout monitor and stability detectors, we can efficiently and accurately manage the reliability of a processor, and re-coup the performance of a processor that would otherwise be lost when processors are over-provisioned to meet an expected lifetime. We simulate a 16 core DSP with a wearout monitor and stability detectors on a mix of four different media algorithms. Using the wearout monitor and stability detectors, we find that by reducing average performance by only 5%, we can increase the lifetime of the processor by 46%